Where It Began

by Ann Redisch Stampler

  “I thought you were going to see that lawyer.”

  “Maybe I went to the lawyer and the dentist. Did you think of that? Maybe I went to the dentist and the lawyer and a police station in freaking Reseda. Maybe I should go to sleep.”

  “Because if you’re drinking, if it’s more than that one time, you need to talk to someone.”

  “Anita, all I do is talk to people. And it was just that time and this time. And now I really have to lie down.” To demonstrate, I lie down and the Rule the Pool hat falls off onto the pillow.

  “Do novocaine and alcohol even go together safely?” Anita says. “I’m going to look this up on the Internet. I’m going to text Sanjiv. Hold on.”

  But before I have time to hold on, I am asleep.

  XXXIV

  IF YOU’RE A FAN OF IRONY, MS. FROST’S FIRST project for me, in the quest to look like I am halfway to being rehabilitated before the Department of Probation gets its hooks into me, is going to AA, and Vivian tells me about it when I am still lying on my bed next to the Rule the Pool hat, sauced.

  I am pretty sure that Billy would appreciate the irony, but not only has he forgotten to mention AA in the first place, he has been exiled to his uncle’s hacienda in Montecito, sharing a room with his nosy little cousin and bereft of electronics, because Agnes had to go to New York on business and doesn’t trust Billy at home without heavy-duty adult supervision after it supposedly took him two hours and forty-five minutes to get to Kap’s house for the Spanish book, and given that his dad is about as present and as capable of providing supervision as John, except that his dad is MIA at Murchison Nash Capital rolling in enormous bundles of cash as opposed to passed out in the den.

  Fortunately, Billy manages to convince his aunt that he can’t stay there for the whole three-day weekend because if he misses any more practice with the water polo team, he’ll end up benched and attending a giant state college full of riff-raff, and she has to let him go home.

  “Just go,” he says, whispering into a prepaid cell phone that he bought at a mini-mart in Oxnard on his way back down the coast while his uncle’s driver pumps the gas and cleans the wind-shield and Billy hides out in the men’s room. “Just go this one time and don’t say anything. Just sit there. Keep your mouth shut and don’t get a sponsor. No sponsor, got that? Gotta go.”

  What do you even wear to kid AA?

  Vivian drives me down the hill and into Brentwood, and she drops me off in front. She seems perfectly happy to consign me to two hours in a room full of alcoholics. But it only takes me thirty seconds in the church hall before I am 100% sure that AA isn’t happening for me, even if it is in this very plush church with exceptionally nice-looking refreshments. As much fun and games as it might be to fake out all the sharing caring adults who want to help me solve my so-called problem, it doesn’t exactly seem realistic to bank on faking out a whole room full of kids with actual drinking problems.

  I mean, it’s not as if their bullshit meters are nonfunctional because of an alcohol-induced stupor.

  Not to mention, some of them look vaguely familiar and have pretty much the same Marc Jacobs flats and pseudo-military jacket that I have, and might actually turn up unexpectedly in my real life, and then what? My big night of drinking untold amounts might be filed somewhere in the Amnesiac Archives, but other than that, I’m not a drunk, and I’m not about to start lying about it in front of a large, sincere audience.

  Not to mention my personal plan, the Gabs and Billy plan, is to suck up to my highly paid professional helpers but trot rapidly in the opposite direction with my lips locked if anybody else wants to Talk About Everything. This is an entire church filled with people who look like they’re dying to talk their little hearts out.

  What am I supposed to do?

  For maybe twenty-nine seconds, I think how probably half the other kids there are in the same stupid situation as me, got caught bombed at a party, downed a bottle of scotch in their bedrooms one time, and zap: Go Directly to Twelve Step. Do Not Pass GO. A stop along the way to getting their Get Out of Jail Free cards.

  Only then they open their mouths and pretty much no, they’re really into it. I feel like a sleazoid Peeping Tom hiding out in the bushes waiting to cop a peek of naked people through his neighbor’s bedroom window.

  It is actually kind of sad. People who drink before school every day and spend first period sucking on mentholated cough drops to clean up their breath. And who look twelve years old. And feel like their lives have nothing to offer. And I’m thinking, No, you’re so cute, you could definitely get a boyfriend. You could end up like me, with a totally screwed-up life but, hey, no drinking problem.

  This is probably the only problem I don’t have.

  But no, here are people who can’t get out of bed or go to sleep without it. People who are incredibly proud they just spent sixty-eight days without it, even though they constantly want it and think about it all the time and show up at meetings where all they do is talk about it, and have to call up other kids to talk them out of using it.

  And I really would have helped them stop it if I had any idea of how to get anyone to do anything. I’m sitting there thinking: You go, fourteen-year-old drunk boy, get a grip, go another sixty-eight days, call up your fifteen-year-old sponsor (if kids even get a kid sponsor which, thank you Billy, I don’t plan to stick around long enough to find out) and smoke a lot of cigarettes because if you think this is bad, wait until you grow up and it turns out you’re exactly like my dad.

  And then I think, big revelation, giant whoop, silent You Go Girl from the helpful helping professionals who sent me to this godforsaken pastry smorgasbord and confession-fest: John is the alcoholic. Not me, John. Why isn’t he here?

  But it doesn’t seem as if it would go over too well to explain that I just drink at parties a couple of times a week, not unlike everybody else at the parties except for the people who just blaze their way into oblivion with weed, and if I belong at this so-called meeting, then we might just as well sink the church into the ground under the sheer weight of the gazillion other kids who all get plowed at the same parties as me and, hello, they aren’t alcoholics either.

  So maybe there are a couple of other places where I drink, such as at lunch in the Class of 1920 Garden, such as at meals other than breakfast where, give me a break, you really do have to be a drunk to drink anything other than a mimosa, which is at least appropriate with eggs. So send for more chairs. Enough so, say, the entire population of France (where they do drink wine with breakfast; I have personally witnessed this) will have someplace to sit in the Brentwood Unitarian Church.

  But I don’t say this. Not to people who drink Stoli out of their thermoses in study hall at Paul Revere Middle School. I wish them well. All I want in life is to find some nice way to get out of there without anyone noticing.

  Except, of course, that everyone is looking me over, waiting for an opportunity to spring out of their chairs and sidle up to me and make me feel all welcome.

  I figure that hanging out in the ladies’ room for the next hour and a half would be a bit obvious and somewhat insulting, so I just sit there in my folding chair leaning as far back as possible without tipping over, not making eye contact with anybody, pretending to listen.

  Every time another one of them starts talking, I glance up, very fast, and every time they stop, I wonder if this is when they’re going to shout out a big Kid AA howdy to all the new people—or for all I know, just me, for all I know, I am the only new person—and force us or just me or whoever to stand up and say something.

  I just slink down further in my chair, sliding my eyes over every corner of the room, checking out the emergency exits just in case.

  When it is over, I run out of there, not saying hi to anybody, just jumping into Vivian’s car and closing my eyes, light-headed and completely clammy.

  XXXV

  gabs123: i cannot go to AA anymore. get me out of AA. i mean it.

  pologuy: shit aa. this is
not good

  gabs123: kill me now. i’m supposed to go all the time. i mean constantly. daily. i am not going to stand around and talk about myself. did u have to go?

  pologuy: long time ago. tiny tot fake aa. i think i got kicked out

  gabs123: how does a person get kicked out of tiny tot fake AA?

  pologuy: i think i hit someone. doofus buddy geiss. hate that kid

  gabs123: buddy geiss!!! wait. isn’t this supposed to b alcoholics ANONYMOUS? thus the second a.

  pologuy: ok some doofus kid identical to buddy geiss. not hit. knocked over his chair when he was in it

  gabs123: y?

  pologuy: who the hell remembers back to tiny tot aa? maybe he took my donut

  gabs123: i don’t know if i’m up for knocking over a doofus to get out of this. what do i do? i’m not a sharing caring gabfest kind of girl.

  pologuy: and that is what we love about u

  What we LOVE about you?!?!?!?!

  gabs123: ?

  pologuy: ok just tell ur social worker u can’t do it

  gabs123: right. that’ll make her happy. frost is the one who’s making me go and she reports to my lawyer. it’s supposed to impress the hell out of probation. remember probation?

  pologuy: think of something else to impress them. it’s not that hard. like i told u before. boo hoo and dig in ur heels. boo hoo queen frostine I can’t go to aa because . . .

  gabs123: because y?

  pologuy: it could b anything. b creative. try again. boo hoo queen frostine i can’t go to aa because . . .

  gabs123: if anyone sees me there my name will be mud all over candyland? did u know mudd was some guy who supposedly helped john wilkes booth shoot abraham lincoln?

  pologuy: thnx for the fun fact. will it b on SAT 2’s? i’m being forced to memorize all words in english language. and an all purpose essay

  gabs123: u wrote an all purpose SAT essay?

  Even though it isn’t too hard to figure out that life is going on without me in it, the idea that Billy was sitting around writing an all-purpose SAT essay while I was out in the Valley getting mug shots taken is somehow mind-boggling. The idea that he could just sit there and concentrate and write essays about his most emotional moment and his most inspirational hero and his most compelling hope, dream, or extracurricular activity, and soon I am going to have to write about how getting past my Problem made me a Better Person to try to get everyone in some sub-regular college admissions office to love me. The idea that I’ve wandered into this horrible, alternate world and have to do all this weird stuff to get back, but everybody else is still sitting there in the real world writing their SAT essays and memorizing the Latin roots of SAT words.

  pologuy: tutor wrote it. i memorize it and adapt it to 200 stupid prompts. it’s inspirational. how i’m on student council and martin luther king and gandhi

  gabs123: can u adapt it to getting me out of AA?

  pologuy: y not? u need 5 compelling paragraphs. need reason from literature or ancient history, current events, and deep personal crap that u get to make up. u can make up the whole thing. u can say ghandi was the first indian guy on the atlanta braves, and that’s where he met MLK. u can say that you’re on council even if ur not. tutor says. what a scam.

  gabs123: the deep personal part is i’ll die if i have to go again.

  pologuy: very compelling. did u make that up?

  gabs123: i am not making this up! do something!

  pologuy: calm down. tell frosty NO AA. you’d rather have therapy

  gabs123: she’s already supposedly giving me therapy.

  pologuy: ok tell her u need to get super intensive therapy because ur super intensively deranged

  gabs123: just kill me now.

  pologuy: listen. ur paying the bitch to do what u want and make the court like it. just be smart about it. i can’t go to AA because . . .

  gabs123: sorry if I’m repeating myself here nash but BECAUSE WHY?

  pologuy: ok because being there makes u want to cut yourself. that sounds nice and girlie

  gabs123: i want to CUT myself? right, with the plastic knife from the coffee cake on the dessert buffet in the back of the church.

  pologuy: makes u want to eat up all the coffee cake, stick your finger down ur throat, barf, and then cut yourself

  gabs123: ew. like she’s going to buy this.

  pologuy: u r paying her to buy this. her job is to buy anything u tell her to buy. trust me on this

  So I call her up and cry. And he’s right again.

  XXXVI

  LISA SAYS, “WHERE WERE YOU? I CAME OVER WITH Anita and your mom was very squirrelly about where you were.”

  “AA.” It just slips out.

  “Wow,” Lisa says.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not going anymore.”

  “No,” Lisa says. “That’s not what I meant. I mean, it could be good for you. You give your worries over to a higher power.”

  “No offense, Lisa, but I’m not giving anything over to a higher power.”

  “Well, no offense, but it might be better than giving things over to Billy Nash.”

  “Did you just say that?”

  “Yeah, well, sorry, all I’m saying is that if you’re having a problem with drinking, AA wouldn’t be the worst place for you to go.”

  “You can talk when you’ve been there. I’m going to go to constant psychotherapy instead, are you happy? Could we please talk about something else? Could we talk about you instead? Pretty, pretty please with a rum ball on top?”

  “Pretty please with a keg on top is more like it,” Lisa says.

  But as it turns out, she is dying to talk about something else. She is, in fact, dying to talk about Junior Spring Fling, which sounds about as weird and alien to my current life as a potato sack race on Mars but beats hearing one more person weigh in on my so-called drinking problem.

  Although it is somewhat odd that now that—instead of festooning the old gym with rolls of crepe paper and watching the Muffins pitch a fit about how much they like pink, silver, and black—I am expanding my range of my fun high school experiences by becoming a lowlife, arrested north of Ventura Boulevard followed by hours in a church full of drunk kids, now Lisa wants to expand her range of fun high school experiences by shopping for a new dress and going to Fling.

  You have to wonder what we even have to talk about anymore.

  “Huey wants to go,” she says. “So I just said I would without thinking and now I’m feeling like maybe this is a mistake.”

  “Huey wants to go to Fling?”

  “I know. You wouldn’t think he’d want to do anything that conventional. It kind of took me by surprise.”

  “Are you sure he doesn’t just want to use you as cover so he can take pictures that make everybody look like decadent slobs for yearbook?” Huey is a big fan of smoky, black-and-white, decadent slob pictures. Only, nobody can tell he’s making fun of them. They think they look gorgeous and artistic.

  “Come on,” Lisa says. She sounds horrified.

  “Sorry. I was joking.”

  “No you weren’t.”

  “Okay, it’s not that I don’t think Huey would want to take you to a dance. It’s just that you’d think he’d be repelled by a rhyming-name dance at Winston.”

  Lisa sighed. “Well, it’s the only dance that’s available. Except for his cousin’s debutante ball in Paris.”

  “He invited you to a deb ball in Paris?”

  “Like my mother’s going to let me go to Paris, France, with Huey? I don’t even know if she’s going to let me go to Spring Fling.”

  “You should one hundred percent go. Tell her it’s a sock hop, for godsake, with poodle skirts and socks, and all the really old teachers are chaperoning because they like Elvis and all that old stuff. They’re going to be dancing the twist. It’s going to be completely harmless.”

  “My mom is pretty sure someone will slip me a rufie.”

  “She’s completely unhinged. It’s the J
unior Spring Fling, not a frat party.”

  “I know. I just don’t want to stick out in a bad way.”

  “All you need is a tight sweater.” Although not, perhaps, a Little Mermaid sweater. “I’ll go shopping with you.”

  “Thanks. Are you going?”

  My first thought is, of course. Of course I’m going. Because I’ve gone to every Winston School social event large and small since September. Because I’m on the committee that has planned and decorated every event large and small since September. Because Billy likes going to parties with a girl who looks damned good and so, of course, I go to parties and I look pretty damned good.

  But, of course, I’m not going anymore.

  “Doubtful,” I say. “I just have to focus on staying out of any form of juvie jail.”

  “How could you go to jail?”

  This makes me remember why I’m not talking about any of this stuff with anyone but Billy and people who are paid to listen and keep quiet about it.

  “Not going to happen. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Won’t you please, please, please, please let me call my uncle for you? He’s a really good lawyer. Listen to me Gabby, don’t take this the wrong way, but you really need to have your own lawyer and not Billy’s lawyer. My uncle says. You really need to look out for yourself here.”

  “Lisa, I’ve got my own lawyer. I was just filling out a bunch of forms for him.”